Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/269

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MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
247

Endurance, love, will yet prevail
Against all laws of hate;
Such armaments can never fail
Our race its best estate.

Let none make common cause with sin,
Be that in honor bound,
For they who fight with God must win
On every battleground.

Though wrongs there are, and wrongs have been,
And wrongs we still must face,
We have more friends than foes within
The Anglo-Saxon race.

In spite of all the Babel cries
Of those who rage and shout,
God’s silent forces daily rise
To bring his will about.

—George Marion McClellan.

THE NEGRO WOMAN

Were it mine to select a woman
As queen of the hall of fame;
One who has fought the gamest fight
And climbed from the depths of shame;
I would have to give the sceptre
To the lowliest of them all;
She, who has struggled through the years,
With her back against the wall.

Wronged by the men of an alien race,
Deserted by those of her own;
With a prayer in her heart, a song on her lips
She has carried the fight alone.